The Staccato Run: A Contemporary Issue in the Zenonian Tradition

Abstract

The “staccato run,” in which a runner stops infinitely often while running from one point to another, is a prototype of the “superfeat” (or "supertask”), that is, a feat involving the completion in a finite time of an infinite sequence of distinct, physically individuated acts. There is no widely accepted demonstration that superfeats are impossible logically, but I argue here, contra Grunbaüm, that they are impossible dynamically. Specifically, I show that the staccato run is excluded by Newton’s three laws of motion, when those laws are supplemented with a certain defensible philosophical judgment.